Perilous Crossings and Pedestrians At Risk: Permitted Left Turns Complicated by a Hodgepodge of Confusing Signals

Editor's Note: A PBS KQED Forum program today (Drivers Not Punished for Pedestrian Deaths) has focused on the concerns about pedestrian injuries and deaths when walkers were using marked crosswalks in San Francisco's Bay Area.

We had our own run-in with a local city employee who twice denied our request for a new crosswalk sign to be put in just before a blind curve to alert drivers to slow down. The employee, after my second request in writing, repeated the denial with, "You did hear my response, Mrs. Gray, didn't you?" in the most condescending manner doubting, I'm sure, my mental competence as well as my hearing acuity. Fortunately, a city representative's assistant intervened and the sign appeared a few months later.

Websites abound with detailed maps about dangerous crossings across the nation from northern California to New York City streets through CrashSite.org. Papers, studies and statistics are plentiful. Some of those are:

TIMS (which is an acronym for Transportation Injury Mapping System) has been established by researchers at the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) at the University of California, Berkeley to provide data and mapping analysis tools and information for traffic safety related research, policy and planning.

The Colorado Department of Transportation has released a report that explores potential trends, based on patterns in crash types and causes, associated with crashes involving bicyclists and pedestrians. ... more >>

"The proactive data integration technique developed in this study was applied to pedestrian safety problems on a college campus, aiding the process of planning and implementing various countermeasures related to education, ... more >>

A number of these studies point out the particularly dangerous locus of the permitted left turn situation:

As opposed to a "protected" left turn, in which a solid green arrow gives a driver the complete right of way in a left-turn lane, a "permitted" left turn is often allowed by a confusing hodgepodge of signals, and drivers may have to pick their way through narrow windows of oncoming traffic.

This difficult driving maneuver, which is played out millions of times a day around the world, is fraught with risk for unwary pedestrians, who too often appear to be an afterthought. The danger is much higher than had been realized, experts say.

"There are far more pedestrian crashes in marked crosswalks than anywhere else on roads, and pedestrians already have a false sense of security," said David Hurwitz, an assistant professor of transportation engineering at Oregon State University. "This study found that one key concern is permitted left turns."

Photograph by Laura Sandt, Portland, Oregon. The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (PBIC). The caption noted that the bike lane curves out of the way of turning transit.